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Mareeba fire, 8 December 2025 Mareeba

Out · last detection 15 Dec 2025, 03:46 UTC

The fire started on 8 December 2025 in Mareeba, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 16,240 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 406th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 266 in Australia in 2025, of 1124.

Burnt area
16,240ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
8 Dec 2025 – 14 Dec 2025
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
8 Dec
2025
Heat detections
367
in a single hotspot: 132 MW
Danger at start
1
Very low · FWI index
Average daily power
543MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

15 Dec 2025
HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Dec14 Dec

How it evolved, day by day

8 Dec 2025 · 1,504 MW · 109 9 Dec 2025 · 8 MW · 5 10 Dec 2025 · 2,041 MW · 125 11 Dec 2025 · 407 MW · 65 12 Dec 2025 · 162 MW · 32 13 Dec 2025 · 142 MW · 18 14 Dec 2025 · 59 MW · 9 15 Dec 2025 · 20 MW · 4
8 Dec 10 Dec 12 Dec 14 Dec

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

40°high
60km/h · peak gust
19%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.2 mm on 22 Dec.

This area had burned before

86% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 162 ha in 2016, 5,694 ha in 2017, 222 ha in 2019, 11,921 ha in 2020, 8,650 ha in 2022, 709 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 13,906 ha that had burned before.

What happened to each town

  1. Mareeba where it started
    16,310 ha reached on 8 Dec
    0.3 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
1 Dec 35.1 °C 46 % 28 km/h 8.0 mm Very low 1
2 Dec 37.2 °C 34 % 30 km/h 1.8 mm Low 6
3 Dec 35.7 °C 39 % 60 km/h 2.6 mm Low 7
4 Dec 32.7 °C 43 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
5 Dec 36.7 °C 30 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
6 Dec 37.3 °C 26 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 19
7 Dec 37.8 °C 19 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
8 Dec 37.2 °C 26 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm High 28
9 Dec 37.1 °C 30 % 40 km/h 0.1 mm High 26
10 Dec 37.9 °C 23 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 26
11 Dec 38.3 °C 21 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
12 Dec 38.4 °C 20 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
13 Dec 38.4 °C 24 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
14 Dec 38.4 °C 23 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 31
15 Dec after 40.0 °C 22 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
16 Dec after 39.4 °C 23 % 38 km/h 0.1 mm High 36
17 Dec after 35.5 °C 43 % 51 km/h 1.7 mm Moderate 20
18 Dec after 37.6 °C 31 % 49 km/h 0.7 mm High 29
19 Dec after 39.1 °C 26 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm High 34
20 Dec after 37.6 °C 27 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
21 Dec after 38.1 °C 28 % 29 km/h 0.1 mm High 29
22 Dec after 39.9 °C 27 % 46 km/h 1.2 mm High 32

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 1 Dec 2025
After · 21 Dec 2025

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 9 December 2025 the air beside the fire reached 24 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak24 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1026 µg/m³
Optical depth0.28
67891011121314151617
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 367Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mareeba fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 8 December 2025 and 14 December 2025: 7 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 16,240 hectares (162.4 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mareeba (16,310 ha, 0.3 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 40.0 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 60 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 36, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Australia (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 000

Satellite cross-check

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 000.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 367 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.